Russell Banks Quotes

What good is sitting all alone in your room?

If I'm not doing something or working on something, I literally just sit in the room and think, which I don't think is productive. I won't go outside for days.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

That's what I'm always searching for - finding the balance between not caring so much to where I put all this pressure on myself. But still caring enough to where it pushes me to work exactly how I've been working so far.

If you just kind of let yourself stay alone and be by yourself, the negative, it is just not going to help you.

It takes effort to not be lonely.

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

I write all the time because I'm lonely. When you're acting, you're working every day all day. But then you have long amounts of time off.

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

I have to remind myself constantly to not be antisocial, because I stay to myself a lot. I'm a lot more introspective than my characters.

If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in poor company.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

The only thing that's better in a group versus being by yourself is the companionship. You have to do a lot of thing by yourself as a solo artist. But it's cool. It's worth it.

Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different.